YouTube Looks To Star Power For New Celebrity Channels?

What if YouTube became a hub for a number of celebrity-curated channels filled with all kinds of original content that was unavailable elsewhere? That’s a potential future business model for the company that’s being floated by CEO Salar Kamangar, according to new rumors.

New York Magazine is reporting that the site may be considering offering celebrities as much as $5 million per channel, with the plan being that said celebrity would then create and curate a “genre-specific” channel filled with all-new three-minute videos that they would own. YouTube hopes, according to the report, that it would recoup its investment through ad revenue for each channel.

Officially, YouTube isn’t responding for requests for comments, but an anonymous insider is quoted as explaining that “the idea is not so much content acquisition as it is to supercharge content creation: By offering a wider range of better-quality content, viewers are happier, Google’s advertisers are happier, and the talent is happier.” So, everyone wins, right?

Well, it depends on the celebrities that say yes, of course. Named in the article are Tim Gunn and Bear Grylls, but it’s not clear if they have actually been approached or are just hypothetical examples. Am I the only person who sees this as being good for minor celebrity’s egos – It’s like they’ll get their own Oprah Winfrey Network, but smaller! – but not necessarily good for viewers?